When you cut out processed foods, your body will experience a significant decrease in sodium.

Even if your sodium intake was too high before, your body would still go through a shock.

As your body experiences a decrease in insulin from cutting down on carbs and sugar, it may also purge essential electrolytes, such as sodium.

Along with purging electrolytes and minerals, your body will purge excess water instead of retaining it, leaving the body dehydrated.

Since the body is likely to experience a significant drop in important minerals, keto dieters need to pay close attention to their sodium intake throughout their keto diet, but especially during the initial transition.

Sodium Intake on a Keto Diet

How do you know if you’re ingesting the correct amount of sodium?

While the symptoms laid out above are easy indicators for lack of sodium, the best way to make sure you don’t have too much sodium is to track your daily nutrition.

A quick way to knock out the symptoms of keto flu is to increase your daily sodium intake by 1-2 teaspoons. This amount can be distributed throughout your meals in a day, instead of taking it all at once.

You can include extra salt in your drinking water, but you need to be careful with this method. Drinking salt water on an empty stomach or simply drinking too much can cause some bad consequences.

Salt water is good for cleansing the colon, but remember that detoxing the body also means excreting all those electrolytes you are trying to maintain in the body. You may also experience dehydration.

So, how much sodium are you supposed to consume on a daily basis?

Depending on how active you are during the day, anywhere from 3,000-5,000 mg of sodium should be included in your diet.

If you typically work at a sedentary office job and do low-impact workouts, your sodium intake should be at the lower end of the scale.

The best way to know what level of sodium is the best for your body is to track your daily sodium intake and observe how you feel on a daily basis. Adding sodium to your diet just a teaspoon at a time can make a world of difference!

Besides stirring salt into your water, there are other ways to include sodium in your keto diet:

Drink bone broth

Eat vegetables from the sea, such as seaweed nori or kelp

Eat salted nuts and seeds as a snack

Add exogenous ketones to your diet

The type of salt you consume is also important! This part will be explained more after going over two other important electrolytes you need to include in your keto mealplan.

Potassium Intake on a Keto Diet

Potassium is another important electrolyte to monitor in your keto plan because the body can’t make potassium on its own. Similar to salt, potassium helps with a lot of crucial bodily functions.

Not only does potassium help regulate the fluids in your body, but it also is part of a healthy mineral balance. These two things are necessary for the body to:

Contract muscles

Regulate the heartbeat

Manage body temperature

Control bladder function

Produce energy

Transfer messages from nerves to muscles

About 3,500 - 4,700 mg of potassium is required on a daily basis.

When you consume the right amount of potassium, you can experience these healthy benefits:

Reduction in muscle cramps - yes, this includes menstrual cramps too!

Reduction in risk for stroke and coronary heart disease.

Reduces the chance of kidney stones by binding with calcium, which stops stones from collecting in the urinary tract.

You can include potassium in your diet through these potassium-rich keto foods:

Avocados

Nuts

Dark, leafy greens

Mushrooms

Exogenous ketones

Magnesium Intake on a Keto Diet

Along with sodium and potassium, magnesium helps regulate the amount of fluid in the body, your mineral balance, and the responses between nerves and muscles.

However, you only need around 400 mg of magnesium on a daily basis to reap its benefits. That’s far less than how much sodium and potassium your body needs.

Needing very little magnesium means that it’s also very easy to be deficient in magnesium when your body is transitioning during the keto diet. Thankfully, there are keto foods that are rich in magnesium.

You can include magnesium in your diet by eating:

Almonds

Dark chocolate

Artichokes

Fish

Cooked spinach

Exogenous ketones

One other place that you may find both potassium and magnesium in is sea salt!

Quite simply, sea salt is seawater that has been dehydrated until only the flaky salt is left.

It has the same nutritional value as table salt, but depending on what area your sea salt is harvested from you may be able to increase your potassium and magnesium intakes.

Supplement with Pink Himalayan Sea Salt

It may seem like all salt is the same, especially when we are talking about sodium. Next time you visit the grocery store, though, take a look at the salt selections. There are quite an array of options to choose from!

How do you know which salt is best for adding electrolytes to your diet? One of the best salts for adding sodium and other important electrolytes to your diet is pink Himalayan salt.

Pink Himalayan sea salt can be easily found in grocery stores. Many prefer the pink salt over traditional table salt because the flavor is stronger and it adds a visual appeal to foods.

However, the lesser known benefit of pink Himalayan salt is that it adds calcium, potassium, and magnesium to your diet! In fact, these electrolytes are what gives Himalayan salt its attractive pink color.

Pink Himalayan salt is normally purchased in grinders, so the salt can maintain its chunky, crystallized form.

Simply use it to season meats, vegetables, eggs, and any other food that could use a dash of salt.

Supplement with Keto Activate

If you are concerned that you are over-salting your foods, or you want to avoid adding salt directly to your water, you can use exogenous ketones, such as Keto Activate.

Keto Activate is a safe way to increase your electrolytes in a convenient powdered form. It looks a lot like protein powder, but it serves a different purpose for keto dieters.

Exogenous ketones are actually beta-hydroxybutyrate, or BHB, which is the key element your body needs for producing energy as it cuts down on blood glucose.

A serving of Keto Activate can easily increase your sodium by 31%. A single scoop of Keto Activate also adds 593 mg of calcium and 323 mg of magnesium to your diet.

You can use exogenous ketones throughout your keto meal plan. They’re a great way to directly increase your ketones for regulating energy and combat the symptoms of keto flu. This is especially beneficial in the beginning weeks of your keto diet.

If you’ve surpassed the initial transition your body goes through to reach ketosis, congratulations! Keto Activate can still be helpful to you.

After a holiday season, you may need some help getting back on track if you indulged in some meals.

Adding a scoop of exogenous ketones to a meal can help you get back to your ketosis more quickly than by adding salty foods to your diet.

Summary

Electrolytes are crucial to a balanced keto diet! You need electrolytes to have the proper amount of water in your blood for regulating muscle and nerve function.

There are certainly opportunities for you to have a surplus of electrolytes as well as a deficit in your body, and both lead to detrimental consequences. However, there are many ways to maintain a healthy level of all the important minerals.

Sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium are the most important electrolytes to keep balanced in your diet.

While you can supplement these minerals through certain keto foods, you can also consume exogenous ketones to get an accurate amount of each mineral every time.

Log your daily nutrition, notably during the first few weeks of your keto diet.

You can observe how you feel when you have too much or too little of each electrolyte, but you can also ensure you’re eating a balanced diet while consuming minimal carbohydrates.

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*These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Individual results may vary, and testimonials are not claimed to represent typical results. All testimonials are by real people, and may not reflect the typical purchaser’s experience, and are not intended to represent or guarantee that anyone will achieve the same or similar results.